A Sermon for Zionism in Belfast

    In the early years of Rabbi Gedaliah Silverstone's rabbinic career, he worked as the rabbi in Belfast. In Belfast he published his first book, pirchei aviv פרחי אביב, in 1901. The book is mostly an assortment of novelae on Talmud, but he included a few sermons at the end. Overtime, Silverstone would find that his sermons were more popular than his novelae and would focus his later books to be almost entirely collections of sermons. 

    One of the sermons in the back of pirchei aviv is a sermon that he gave at the dedication of the dorshei tzion Zionist organization in Belfast. The sermon itself, like most of Silverstone's work, is not anything profound or monumental, but it provides a glimpse into the rhetoric of early religious Zionism. The speech, being published in 1901, was written at least one year before the Mizrachi party was organized. Silverstone focuses his message on opposing assimlationism and encourages his audience to maintain their observance of the Torah and Judaism. If Zionism is about not assimilating into the other nations, then the best way to not assimilate is to maintain observance of Judaism. 

    Silverstone draws from biblical and rabbinic literature to build his case of anti-assimilationism and adherence to Judaism. He also makes an argument from "current events" to bolster his advocacy for the benefits of maintaining Jewish observance. He argues that the Russian porgroms of the 1880s were intially caused by assimilated Jews. He relays a fabricated story in which a young boy hiding in terror from the violent mob asked his father if they are Jewish since his family was so assimilated into Russian society that he was never told they were Jewish. These same kinds of arguments continue to be made today about the most recent catastrophes of Jewish history. Avigdor Miller and others have blamed the holocaust on assimiated Jews as well. This argument is less about the actual cause of these calamities than it is about the anxiety over assimilation that was brought by emancipation.

Below I have transcribed the sermon as it was printed in Hebrew and a translation beneath it. 

דרוש ציוני

מה שדרשתי בעזהי"ת פה בעלפאסט לדורשי ציון.

כתיב פ' לך לך ט"ו ויהי השמש לבוא ותרדמה גדולה נפלה על אברהם והנה אימה חשכה גדולה נופלת עליו, כי ראה ברוח הקודש שבניו יגלו מעל שולחן אביהם ויהיה להם גלות אחר גלות נדנוד אחר נדנוד טלטול אחר טלטול ומזה היה נפל עליו אימה חשכה גדולה כי שמא מרוב הצרות ומרוב הגלות המר הזה שלא יהיה להם עוד כח לשאת ולסבול כל עמל ותלאה ויהיה אצלם אבדת הרגש ואבדת הרגש היא התחלת היאוש והיאוש היא הנסיבה המודיעה את מהירת המות, עיין בהקדמת ר' יעקב ריינס שליט"א בספר נאד של דמעות, ומזה היה פחד אברהם כי שמא יתערבו בגוים ויתבוללו במעשיהם כי אי אפשר שלא ילמדו מחוקי הגוים בזמן שהם על ארץ נכריה ובניו יהיו נע ונד בארצות הרחוקות באפריקא, ואוסטראליע, בגלותם המר אשר נדמה כאישון לילה ואפילה, בלילה הארוך שרבים קמים עליו והשתדלו לעשות גוי אחד בארץ וע"ז פחד אברהם אבינו הזקן.

ויאמר לאברהם ידוע תדע כי גר יהיה זרעך בארץ לא להם שהקב"ה משיב לו דברי תנחומים שאל תדאג בעדם אברהם, כי הרגשתם רגש הדת והיהדות והעם יתקיימו בהם תמיד ובכל זמן יהיו זוכרים ויודעים שהם גולים מארצם מארץ ישראל, ומה שהם מפוזרים בארצות אחרות לא להם הם, שהם רק גרים בארץ לא להם ורעיון התבוללת יהיה רחוק מהם ועי"ז רק עי"ז יש להם אחריות ותקוה טובה "ועוד לא אבדה תקותינו."

וזה שאמר לו הקב"ה ידוע תדע כי רק גר יהיה זרעך בארץ לא להם שאם יהיו במדינת אפריקא לא יתבולל להיות כבני אפריקא, ואם יהיו באמעריקא לא יתבולל להיות כבני אמעריקא רק כגר יהיה זרעך בארץ לא להם ולא כתושב רק שהרגשתם יתקיימו בהם תמיד שיהיו יודעים שהם בני ארץ ישראל ויעשו כולם אגודה אחת שיהיה אחדות בישראל כי מפני שנאת חנם גלינו מארצינו ואם רוצים לשוב לארצינו צריכין אנו לעזוב את מעשינו אשר מפניהם גלינו וצריכין אנו לעשות חברות לציון כמו שאנו עושים היום.

והנה מצינו המס' גיטין בפרק הנזקין מעשה ב"ר יהושע בן חנניא שהלך לכרך גדול שברומי אמרו לו תינוק אחד יש בבית האסורים יפה עינים וטוב מראה הלך ועמד על פתח בית האסורים אמר מי נתן למשיסה יעקב וישראל לבוזזים ענה אותו תינוק ואמר הלא ה' זו חטאנו לו ולא אבו בדרכיו הלוך ולא שמעו בתורתו אמר מובטחני בו שיהיה מורה הוראה בישראל וכו'.

והקשו המפרשים הלא לא דבר גדול השיב לו התינוק דהוא שאל לו רישא דקרא והתינוק השיב לו סיפא דקר אוזיל קרי בי רב הוא וממה היה מובטח שאמר מובטחני בו שיהיה מורה הוראה בישראל.

ואמרתי בזה כי ידוע שכל הצרות והגזרות שהיה לבלל האומה הישראלית הוא בא מטעם ההתבוללת אשר הם רוצים להתערב בגוים ולעשות כמעשיהם ואם הם גרים באמעריקא הם רוצים להיות לעשות ולהתכולל בחוקתיהם יותר כמבני אמעריקא הנולדים שם ובדבר זה חושבים שאם יחללו שבת בפרהסיא ר"ל או יאכלו טרפות או שהם יקחו בת נכריה ויגלחו זקנם ימצאו חן בעיניהם, כי הם עושים כמעשיהם, והם מתחלפים שמותיהם.

אבל האמת הוא יבין דרכו שטעות הוא בידם כי על חוטמיהם ניכרים שהם בני אברהם יצחק ויעקב ואבנים הנשלכים בשוקים וברחובות לא יחסרו למטרתם ותכליתם לבוא על ראשו אף כי הוא מתבולל את עצמו בכל ההתבוללת וכל ההתבוללת האילו לא יועיל לו.

אבל אנו יודעין שרק ע"י תורתנו הקדושה אנו חיין וקיימין בהגלות המר הזה, ועיין בספר נאד של דמעות שאמר בזה הלשון הגיע השעה להתעורר ולדעת כי התורה הקדושה היא חיי היהודי ונשמתו נפשו ודמו כי על ידה רק על ידה לא גוע לשחת ובעוצם כחה הוא חי וקיים זה אלפי שנים, וכמו הדם שהוא נבלע באברי האדם ונוזל בעורקיו והוא יסוד חיי האדם, כן התורה נבלעת באברי היהודי ונוזלת בעורקיו והיא היא יסוד ושורש חייו, וכשאז"ל באדר"נ פכ"ד הלומד תורה הילדותו ד"ת נבלעין בדמיו כי התורה הבאה בקרבו מתלכדת עם דמו והיא שופעת לו חיים, וכמו עורקי וגידי הדם דפיקתם ותנועתם הם אותות בחיים ושביתת הדפיקה והעדר התנועה מעידים על אסיפת החיים כן הרגשת דפיקת עורקי התורה ותנועתם הם אותות חיי היהודי, ומנוחתם ושביתתם הם סימני וציוני המיתה עכ"ל הרי חזינן שרק ע"י תורתנו אנו חיין הגלות הזה כי הן עם לבדד ישכון אם הם יודעין שהם עם ישראל לשמור את הדת כהלכתה אז הם ישכון, אבל ובגוים, אם רוצים לעשות כמעשה הגוים ולמצוא חן בעיניהם עי"ז לא יתחשב, כמו שאנו יודעין זה לא מכבר כשהיה גלות מאָסקוואַ שבפאָגראָמען לא התחילו מהאנשים שהיו נזהרין בדת היהדות רק מהאנשים אשר היו עושין כמעשיהן, אשר בן אחד שאל לאביו בעת שעלה המות החלונו, להרוס ולאבד את כל הונו, אם גם אנו מבני אברהם יצחק ויעקב זה היה שאלתו כי לא ידע בעצמו אם יהודי הוא, מעתה מובן מאליו שגם אנשים המתבוללים לא מצאו חן בעיני העם.

וזה היה הויכוח של ר' יהושע בן חנניא עם התינוק שהלך לכרך גדול שברומי שהם הרומים גלו אותנו מארצנו והחרבו את מקדשנו ומצא תינוק יפה עינים וטוב מראה וקווצותיו סדורות לו תלתלים כי הנער הזה היה מתבולל את עצמו לילך ככל בני הרומים בשערותיו ובבגדיו וחשב שבזה ימצא חן בעיני הרומים, ובאמת היה נדח מדחי אל דחי יד שהיה ניתן לבית האסורים אמר לו יהושע בן חנניא אמור לי נער המתבולל מי נתן למשיסה יעקב וישראל לבוזזים אמור לי, אמור לי, למי הוא האמת אם לנו שאנו אומרים שרק הן עם לבדד ישכון ולשמור את היהדות ולא להתבולל במעשיהם ולהיות כשאר גוים, או עמכם שאתם אומרים רק להתבולל ולעשות כמעשיהם ובזה ימצאו חן בעיניהם ראה בני, איכה, "אתה בן המתבולל, בבית האסורים אתה" ולפי דעתך היה לך להיות כאדם היותר גדול שברומי, וענה אותו התינוק "האמת אתך ר' יהושע בן חנניא שגם אני מתחרט על הדרך אשר הלכתי עד כה כי הלא ה' זו חטאנו לו ולא אבו בדרכיו הלוך ולא שמעו בתורתו כי עתה אראה שהאמת אתכם", "אמר ר' יהושע בן חנניא מובטחני בו שמורה הוראה בישראל" באיזה דרך לילך ואין חכם כבעל נסיון. ע"כ החיוב עלינו לחזק א"ע בדת היהדות כי הלא עמים רבים בימי הבוננים קשרו על האומה הישראלי מלחמה וכולם כאחד שמו להם למטרה להעבירם להכחידם מן העולם ולהסיר מהם כל רגשות האנושות ובכ"ז הם חיים וקיימים יודעים ומרגישים ככל אדם ועולים עוד בחכמתם וידיעתם, אשר מכל העמים אין להם זכר וזה רק ע"י תורתינו הקדושה אשר אנו מחזיקין בה ורק ע"י התורה נזכה לגאולה שלמה גאולת עולם אמן.

Zionist Sermon 

What I preached with the help of God may he be blessed here in Belfast for the Dorshei Zion

        It is written in parshat lech lecha [Genesis] 15 “As the sun was about to set, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a great dark dread descended upon him.” Because he saw in the holy spirit that his sons would be exiled from the table of their father and they will have exile after exile, wandering after wandering, and displacement after displacement. The ‘great dark dread’ had descended on him because perhaps from the magnitude of the hardship and the magnitude of this bitter exile they will no longer have any more strength to carry and bear all the trouble and misfortune. They will become emotionally numb and emotional numbness is the beginning of despair and despair is a signal that alerts of approaching death. Look at the introduction of Rabbi Yaakov Reines, may he merit a lengthy good life Amen, in the book Jug of Tears [נאד של דמעות,] Abraham was terrified that maybe they would mix with the nations and become assimilated in their actions because it is impossible that they will not learn from the customs of the nations when they are in a foreign land and their children will wander to distant lands in Africa and Australia, in their bitter exile which is like the middle of the night and darkness, during this long night many arise upon him and try to make one nation in the land and it was because of this that Avraham our father the elder was terrified.

 

        “And [God] said to Abram, “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs,”  the Holy One blessed is He answered him with words of consolation, ‘do not worry about them Avraham,’ for their sentiment is the sentiment of religion and Judaism and the nation will exist in them constantly and at all times they will remember and know that they are exiled from their land from the land of Israel, and when they are scattered through other lands that are not theirs, that they are just dwelling temporarily in a land that is not theirs and the idea of assimilation will be distant from them. And through this and only through this they have a future and good hope “Our hope is not yet lost” [עוד לא אבדה תקותינו.]

This is what the Holy One blessed is He say to him “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs,” that if they are in the province of Africa they will not assimilate to be like the Africans, and if they will be in America they will not assimilate to be like the Americans, your seed will only be like a stranger in a land not theirs and not like a resident. Only because of their sentiment will it continue to exist in them that they know that they are natives of the land of Israel and they will all make one union that there will be unity in Israel since it was because of baseless hatred that we were exiled from our land and if we want to return to our land we need to abandon our actions which caused us to be exiled and we need to make Zionist organizations like we are doing today. 

We find in tractate Gitin in chapter hanizkin an act of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah in which he went to a large city in Rome, one child said to him ‘there is someone in the prison with beautiful eyes and good appearance’ he went and stood at the entrance of the prison he said “Who was it gave Jacob over to despoilment and Israel to plunderers?” (Isaiah 42:24) a child answered and said “Surely,  GOD—against whom they sinned, In whose ways they would not walk, And whose Teaching they would not obey,” (ibid) he said ‘I am certain that he will become a teacher of instruction in Israel”

The commentators challenged, didn’t that child answer with something insignificant, since he asked him the beginning of the verse and the child answered him the end of the verse and then he declared him to be a rabbi?! Why was he certain when he said ‘I am certain that he will become a teacher of instruction in Israel.”

I said about this that it is known that all the troubles and decrees that were enacted to assimilate the Israelite nation came from a reason of the assimilation that they wanted to mix with the nations and act like their actions. If they lived in America they want to be like, to act and to be included in their customs more than Americans who were born there and with this they think that if they desecrate the Sabbath in public, (save us merciful one!) or they eat treif meat or they marry the daughter of a foreigner or they shave their beard, they will find favor in their eyes, since they are acting like their actions, and they change their names. 

But the truth is for one who understands his way, that it is an error in their hands because it is recognizable on their noses that they are sons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the stones which are thrown in the markets and streets will not be diminished in their targets and purpose to come to his head even when he assimilates himself with all the assimilation and these assimilations will not benefit him.

 

But we know that only through our holy Torah do we live and exist in this bitter exile, and see in the book Jug of Tears that he says in this language “the hour has arrived to be awaked and to know that the holy Torah is the life of the Jew and his soul, his soul and his blood for through its hand only through its hand he does not whither to the depths and with the strength of its power he lives and exists these thousands of years. And like the blood which is swallowed within the limbs of a human and flows in his arteries and it is the fundamental of human life, such is the Torah which is swallowed in the limbs of the Jew and flows in his arteries and it is the foundation and root of his life, and as our sages may their memory be a blessing say in Avot d’Rabbi Nathan chapter 24, ‘One who studies Torah in his youth, the words of Torah are swallowed in his blood’ because the Torah which enters him is contained in his blood and it invigorates him, and like the arteries and veins their beating and movement are signs of life and pausing of beating and lack of movement testify to the gathering of life such is the feeling of beating of the arteries of the Torah and their movement they are signs of life for the Jew, and their resting and pausing are signs and signals of death. End quote. Here we have seen that only through our Torah can we live in this exile because “There is a people that dwells apart” (Numbers 23:9) if they know that they are the nation Israel to keep the religion according to its laws then they will dwell, but “among the nations” if they want to act like the actions of the nations and to find favor in their eyes through this “they will not be reckoned,” as we know that not long ago in the exile of Moskow that the Pogroms did not start because of the people who were adherents to the Jewish religion rather because of the people who were acting like their actions, when a son asked his father when death was ascending at his window, to destroy and to plunder all his property, if we are also from the sons of Avraham Isaac and Jacob that was his question because he did know himself if he was Jewish. Now it is self-evident that even assimilated people do not find favor in the eyes of the nation.

This was the argument of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah with the child when he went to the big city in Rome that they the Romans exiled us from our land and destroyed our temple and he found this child with beautiful eyes and good appearance and his locks arranged in curls for this boy was assimilating himself to go like all the Romans with his hair and garments and he thought that with this he could find favor in the eyes of the Romans, but in truth he was rejected from rejection to rejection until he was placed in prison. Yehoshua ben Chananiah said to him, ‘Tell me assimilated boy, “Who was it gave Jacob over to despoilment and Israel to plunderers?” tell me, tell me who has the truth is it us who say that only “There is a people that dwells apart” (Numbers 23:9) and to keep Judaism and not to assimilate into their actions and to be like the rest of the nations, or with you who say to only assimilate and to act like their actions and with this they will find favor in their eyes. See my son, how can it be, “you are an assimilated person” you are in prison” and according to your opinion you should become like the greatest person in Rome, and the child answered him “the truth is with you Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah since I also regret the path which I walked until here “Surely,  GOD—against whom they sinned, In whose ways they would not walk, And whose Teaching they would not obey,” for now I see that the truth is with you,” “Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah said, I am certain that he will become a teacher of instruction in Israel” about which way to walk and there is no sage like the master of a test. Therefore the obligation is upon us to strengthen ourselves in the religion of Judaism because there were many nations in the past who plotted war upon the Israelite nation and every one of them placed a goal to remove and destroy them from the world and to remove from them all human feelings and despite all this they live and exist knowing and feeling like any man and exceed in their wisdom and knowledge, that from all the nations there is no memory of them and this is only through our holy Torah and that we grasp and only through the Torah we will merit complete eternal redemption Amen. 

The Golem as a Medium of Self-Defense

In the obscure corners of the internet that I frequent there has been some discussion about the golem as a story about self-defense in the context of recent Israeli military actions. Though it is understood that the self-defense angle is a modern addition to the story, I was kind of curious about how and when that element of the story developed. 

The earliest written version of the golem story is from a 17th century autograph kabbalistic text called יסודי תורת משה and remains unpublished. The short story, as translated by Moshe Idel in his book Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, reads as follows:

And I have heard, in a certain and explicit way, from several respectable persons that one man, [living] close to our time, in the holy community of Helm, whose name is R. Eliyahu, the master of the name, who made a creature out of matter [Golem] and form [ẓurah] and it performed hard work for him, for a long period, and the name of 'emet was hanging upon his neck, until he finally removed for a certain reason, the name from his neck and it turned to dust.

Later retellings of this story would add a specific justification for why Rav Eliyahu Baal Shem of Chelm deactivated his golem. Rav Yaakov Emden, a descendant of Rav Eliyahu, in שאילת יעב"ץ ב:פ"ב explained that the golem slowly grew and Rav Eliyahu deactivated it out of a fear that it would destroy the world. This becomes the core of later more elaborate versions of the story. In which a rabbi creates a golem and the golem becomes a threat to the community or the wider world. 

In the earliest versions of the Maharal of Prague's golem, the Maharal creates a golem which he uses to help him with chores. When the Maharal forgets to deactivate the golem before Shabbat, the golem begins to go rougue and damages property. Then the Maharal deactivates the golem and hides the golem's body away. 

The story of the Maharal's golem is a historically romantic folktale that exists in the context of other romantic literature in the 19th century. These other romantic short stories and novels play with the idea of a golem or golem-like being developing feelings as an individual character. Most famously, there's Frankenstein's monster, but there are versions of this story that are specific to the golem. Rudolf Lother's short story The Golem of Rabbi Loeb, which was published in english translation in the Menorah magazine, portrays the golem as the manifestation of Eleazar's love for his reluctantly bethrothed Esther. (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3); (Also see Eden Dekel and David Gantt Gurley, "How the Golem Came to Prague," in Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 103, No. 2 (Spring 2013): 241–238.)

None of these stories contain any events in which the golem becomes the protector of the Jewish communtiy. Yet somehow, in the 1920 film The Golem: How He Came into the World, the golem is specifically created to protect the Jewish community of Prague. 

In the narrative of the film, the emperor sends a decree to expell the Jews from Prague since they have been accussed of killing Christ and oppressing the Christian residents of the city. In response, the Maharal creates the golem. For a bit the Maharal tests the golem's abilities by having him aid in household chores. The Maharal and his golem soon set out to meet with the emperor during a festival and somehow convince him to repeal the decree. 

Upon arriving at the festival, the emperor asks the Maharal to entertain the crowd with one of his magic tricks. The Maharal offers to show a moving picture of Jewish history, but warns that if the audience laughs at all there will be dangerous consequences. This stipulation is a trap. The Maharal projects the image of a caravan of middle eastern nomads, one particularly wizzened man looks to the audience and declares that he is Ahasuerus the wandering Jew. The audience bursts out laughing. With the pretext, the Maharal causes the roof of the banquet hall to begin collapsing. Some people get crushed in the rubble, while others jump out of the windows to their deaths. In desparation the emporer offers to repeal his decree against the Jews if the Maharal saves him. Immediately, the Maharal orders the golem hold up the collapsing roof, saving the emperor and the others who haven't been crushed yet. 

Using the literary motifs of the romantic versions of the golem story, the movie translates the increasing power of the golem into the golem distancing itself from its creator and becoming more human. It is this emotional development of the golem that eventually leads it to kidnap the Maharal's daughter Miriam and accidentally set the ghetto on fire. 

The golem movie seems to have greatly popularized the self-defense element of the golem story. Almost all of the versions of the story that follow contain some element of Jewish community self-defense in the golem story. This element of community protection becomes integral to the comic book super heros that were based on the golem. 

The golem movie did not orginate the self-defense motif in the golem story. I was able to locate one published version of the golem story contianing a narrative of communal self-defense. It's likely there are a few more that pre-date the 1920 golem movie, but I have not been able to locate them. 

In 1897, the Jewish Publication Society produced a small book of Jewish folktales by Henry Iliowizi called In The Pale. One of the stories in this book is titled The Baal Shem and His Golem. Although the title seems to make it fit right into the tradition of previous golem stories, almost everything contained within it is a departure from the traditional golem story. 

This is the plot summary: 

Payutin, the recently appointed magistrate of Karolin, falls in love with Mayor Pozanow’s daughter Tilka. The couple, holding deeply antisemitic beliefs, recruit Russian Orthodox Father Shapirow, the son of a Jewish convert, to convince Mayor Pozanow to target the Karolin Hassidim. Mayor Pozanow instructs the Karolin fire brigade to respond to any loud festive noise created by the Hassidim worshiping as if it was a call of emergency, and then charge the Hassidim with disorderly conduct and fine them for the cost of the false alarm. 

Rav Aarele Baal Shem of Karolin instructs his Hassidim to ignore the new policy and continue worshiping as usual. Then, he enlists the help of the local Jewish blacksmith Pulasky to create a golem. After spiritually cleansing himself, Pulasky studies the divine names with Rav Aarele and summons a divine workforce to staff his workshop all night. When the sun rises, Pulasky and his spirit team have created a fire breathing iron monster. On the day of Payutin and Tilka’s wedding, Rav Aarele sent the iron golem to attack the wedding. The golem killed all the people at the wedding and destroyed the mayor’s house.

That's the story, its just the Jews lived happily ever after and defeated their enemies. There's no part where the golem turns on the Jewish community. In fact the story stresses "Not a Jewish house was damaged; not a Jewish body hurt." 

Although the story refers to Rav Aarele's creation as a golem, the creature is quite different from the traditional golem. In the underlying mystical reasoning for the golem, it is necessary for the golem to created from clay just like God created humans from dirt. The golem is created in a human form. The fact that the golem appears on the outside to be almost human was intriguing to the romantic authors who sought to explore the similarly almost human mind contained within the golem. 

Rav Aarele's golem is neither made from clay nor formed to look like a human. This is how Rav Aarele describes the golem to the blacksmith Pulasky, 

. . . forge for me a horror of black iron. It shall be as awe-inspiring as Death, as terrible as the Plague, gigantic as the Anak who followed Noah's Ark through the waters of the deluge, implacable as Satan the Beast and Lilith the Harlot. Hissing serpents shall be its hair; its eyes shall glow like the fire of hell; from its mouth shall shoot forth a live dragon as tongue; its claws shall be like those of the tiger; and its tail a venomous hydra. The Golem's hands shall reach to the soles of its feet. Dress it in a garb of feathers as black as Abaddon. It shall stride forth with wings outspread, shall breathe fire and vomit flame; a hellish roar shall issue from its throat; and I shall cause it to move and act as a power possessed of reason and will.

This golem is as inhuman as possible. Iliowizi specifically rejects any of the romantic human weakness or instability of the traditional golem. Rav Aarele's golem is simply an agent of death that can only harm oppressors of the Jewish community. The reference to the safety of Jewish houses during the golem's rampage is a clear reference to the death of the Egyptian firstborn in the Exodus story. Iliowizi's golem is an idealized form of divine protection and defense. 

In creating this perfect divine agent of retribution, Iliowizi rejects the foundational message of earliest golem stories. Looking back to Rav Yaakov Emden's retelling of the story, the golem is inherently a growing threat to safety of the world. Later story tellers found different ways of expressing this threat. They all illustrated it with some harm befalling the Jewish community. While transforming the golem into an agent for community defense, Iliowizi sheds the fundamental message of all the golem stories. That a human cannot create a perfect creation.

Paul Wegener synthesized Iliowizi's golem of self-defense with human feeling golem of the romantic stories. He created a powerful message about the dangers of violent self-defense and how it can backfire. In doing so, he maintained foundational message of the limits of human achievement.

The archetype of Iliowizi's golem is still very present in the cultural imagination of the modern Jewish community. We tell ourselves that Rav Aarele's monster golem is attacking the bad guys, and everyone it kills deserves to die. We tell ourselves that no Jewish houses will be harmed by the golem. After all the golem we created has been ridden of human weakness and will only target our oppressors. 

Just because Iliowizi denies that the golem is a danger to the world, does not make it true. He simply gives us permission to pretend that the golem can maintain our communal defense forever without any consequences. Such a blind attitude will only lead us to severe consequences. 

Iliowizi's golem is a complete fantasy, whether or not he intended it to be read as such, that's what it is. An army is made up of people, not divine mechanical monsters. Unlike divine mechanical monsters, people are immoral. There is no such thing as a moral army, let alone a 'most moral army in the world.'  

Anti-Zionist Discourse

With the current surge of support for Palestinian liberation, people are looking for an ideological framework to understand why everything has been happening. As always, it is easier to formulate an oversimplified model of ideologies, than to examine the current and historical events at face value. Accordingly, arguments that seek to delegitimize Zionism have resurged in popularity. 

Ideas such as the Khazar theory of Jewish origin are making the rounds again. The Khazar theory posits that Ashkenazi Jews are primarily descendent from Khazar converts to Judaism. The Khazar Khaganate was an early medieval central Asian state that converted to Judaism in the 8th century CE. There are many problems with this theory. Primarily, the historical evidence for the conversion of the Khazars is extremely limited. The singular primary source for this event, namely a letter that was supposedly sent by a "King Joseph" of the Khazars to Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the Jewish foreign minister of Abd ar-Rahman III, Kalif of Andalusia. Though it is certain that Hasdai believed there to be a Jewish Khazar state, and he most likely tried to send them a letter, the letter that is traditionally considered to be the response is very suspect. Forgeries of this kind abounded during the Middle Ages.

Jews during this era were stateless in a moment when the Christian and Muslim worlds seemed to united against each other. There was a general idea that a secret Jewish kingdom would arise to retake Jerusalem and usher in the Messianic era. A Jewish traveler who went by Eldad ha-Dani famously claimed that there was a hidden kingdom of the 10 lost tribes in East Africa. The letter from King Joseph of the Khazars fits right into this era of global travelers claiming to have found Jewish kingdoms. Some archeological evidence suggests that there were some Jew in the Caucuses during this era. It is possible that some of the Khazar nobility converted to Judaism as a middle-ground monotheistic religion that allowed them to stay neutral in the global dichotomy of Christianity and Islam. There is not nearly enough evidence to suggest that there were enough Khazar converts to be the primary ancestor population of Ashkenazi Jews. 

Anyone who has studied the historical record knows that there were already large Jewish population centers in Europe when the Khazars were supposed to have converted. This theory has to ignore so much of established historical fact that it feels ridiculous to have to refute. Despite this, most people have little idea of how history is studied and just assume that if this idea is written about, it must be true. 

The Khazar theory is helpful for people who seek to delegitimize Zionism. It allows them to form a category of illegitimate nationalisms that have no good reason to exist. Accepting the Khazar theory as a good model of Jewish heritage, the Jews have no reason to live in Palestine, since they are actually from central Asia. This is unlike the indigenous Palestinians, who have lived in Palestine since time immemorial. The Khazar theory itself fails to account for anyone who isn't a descendent of Eastern Ashkenazi Jews. Part of the original impetus for the Khazar theory was that the pre-WWII Eastern European Jewish population had grown so fast during the early modern period that some anthropologists were skeptical that they were really fully descendent of the western European Jewish migrants. Instead, the large population increase was due to the assimilation of many unknown central Asian Jews who they imagined migrated to the Kingdom of Poland en-masse. This theory was, and remains, fully European centric. In its origin context, it allowed western Europeans to respect the emancipation and integration of western European Jews, as they were true "Semites" and civilized, whereas the Eastern European Jews were fit to hate because they were primarily uncivilized barbarians of the central Asian Steppe. This also likely formed an associated with "invading" Eastern European Jewish migrants with the medieval Mongol hordes. Much in the same way that in the US, people like to label the Latin American immigrants as criminals and rapists. 

The Khazar theory does not account for the ancestry of Mediterranean, West, Central, and South Asian Jewish populations that participated in Zionism. 

It is legitimate to differentiate between the Jewish Zionists and the indigenous Palestinians. The vast, vast majority of the Jews who live in Israel are descendants of immigrants who came in the last century through Zionism. Many immigrants choose to change their names. In Israel, where modern-Hebrew was imposed as the national Jewish language, many families from all over the diaspora chose to change their last names to Hebrew equivalents under this cultural pressure. You find Eastern European Jews changing their names from Greun to ben-Gurion, or west Asian Jews changing their name from Abdullah to Ovadiah. You can find people online referring to Bibi by his ancestors' Polish last name, in an effort to highlight his immigrant Jewish heritage.  

The implication is that the immigration reflects an illegitimate nationalism or illegitimate existence in the land. I want to address each of these thoughts independently. 

Nationalism is always fabricated and made up. Political historians generally look to the French revolution for the origins of modern political thought, since that revolution really had it all. The idea of nationalism was expressed for the first time during this revolution. Previously, the leaders of a country imagined that they themselves embodied the government. The French revolutionaries adapted the ideas of social contract theory to mean that the French people, the nation, together held the power of French governance. In many ways the "French nation" was a fiction. The people who lived in France were determined by the borders drawn during the Monarchical period. The borders during the revolution had been drawn at the peace of Westphalia. In order to argue for the reality of the French people, the government began to impose of Parisian French as the true French language in order to create a common language for the people of France. Similarly, a national culture for France had to be developed. This manufactured unity of the French people was a powerful narrative that sought to unite them under a democratic political system. 

Not everyone who lived in the borders of France was immediately considered part of the French nation. The Jews of Alsace had to fight pretty hard to get nominally equal French citizenship, since it was not immediately granted when the revolutionary government formed. On one hand, nationalism can be used to liberate a people from an oppressive government that does not represent them, but it also necessarily excludes people and provides a new medium for discrimination. The Jews of Alsace were seen as foreigners who did not belong in the already complete French nation. Already built nation states tend to be stable enough to critique themselves and tolerate immigrants. This generally manifests in people arguing that immigrants can assimilate in the national culture or the nation can be multi-cultural. Generally, the prevalence of these ideas lead to more tolerance of immigrants, which is a good thing. 

Palestinian nationalism is foundationally as false as any other nationalism. I hope that people understand that when they critique Zionism in the same way. However, Palestinian nationalism is rightly deserving of our favor, since it is in the "fighting oppressive government" stage. Palestinian nationalism also has an "other," a group that is definitely not part of it. Those are the Zionist Jews. Though in theory, many claim they happily embrace non-Zionist Jews, in practice anti-Zionist regimes have ended up just discriminating against Jews in general. To be fair, there is much to hate about what Zionism does to a Jewish community. The transformation of religion into nationalism is not pretty. Unfortunately, most religious community in the world today possess elements of religious nationalism. We still live in the era of Ethno-Nationalism, and its popularity shows no signs of waning. Any discrimination against religious-Nationalism will lead to increased government oversight of the religious community, which if not distributed equally, will manifest as religious discrimination. Also it is almost impossible to destroy ideas directly, they generally need to be superseded by more popular ideas. 

Regarding immigration. Most of the Jews who live in Israel today are descendants of immigrants who came in the last century. Under Zionist direction, many of them have participated in the Zionist settler colonial process. Small amounts of Jewish immigration to the region has existed for centuries. Following the first crusade, when the historic Palestinian Jewish community was mostly wiped out, diaspora Jews began constituting the majority of Palestine's Jewish community. By the early modern period, there were sizable Jewish populations in the Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. In 19th century, the majority of the Jews living in these areas were of Spanish Jewish descent, most of them were settled in the region by the Ottoman empire after they were expelled from Spain the 1492. A minority of them were immigrants from eastern Europe, and an even smaller minority were descendants of the indigenous Jewish population. 

With the increasing popularity of Zionism at the turn of the 20th century, more Jews began to immigrate to Palestine with the intention of colonizing it. In Palestine, at the time, the majority of the people living there were peasant farmers who rented from large landowners, in a feudal system of farming. The Zionists bought land from these large landowners and then evicted the native Palestinian peasants. This was effectively the start of tensions between indigenous Palestinians and Jewish immigrants. Indigenous Palestinian violence against the Zionist settlers was stoked by preachers like Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, who framed the Jewish immigrants within an Islamic context, weaponizing Islamic antisemitism against the Jewish colonizers. 

Anti-colonial resistance is a legitimate cause, but the anti-colonial activity of the area, took on an antisemitic character which threatened even the Jews who were not participating the in the colonial activity. Continuously increasing tensions. 

Foreign supporters of Palestinian liberation, who don't consider themselves antisemites, cannot be in favor of expelling the "foreign Jewish population" of Palestine. It is difficult to determine if people who believe in a liberated Palestinian state will be tolerant of a large Jewish population in the territory. The militant Palestinian liberation groups like Hamas and Hezbollah tend to believe that the Jews will emigrate out of fear once they achieve enough regional power. This mass emigration is unlikely to happen. The idea is based on the narrative of the wandering Jew who flees danger. Even though some Jews may leave, I find it unlikely that it will happen on the scale that they imagine. Other Arab states, like Yemen and Iraq have undergone processes like this, but they were only successful because Israel was willing to absorb so many Jewish immigrants. All the countries that attempted this before the state of Israel was created generally failed to induce a mass emigration of their Jewish populations.   

Those who fantasize about a mass emigration of their perceived enemies tend to be supportive of those enemies' extermination if they won't leave. We are seeing this right now with Israel. The most fascistic Zionists within Israel, especially the followers of Meir Kahane, fantasized about a mass emigration of Arabs from Israel. Kahane proposed bribing them all to leave, but they really wanted to them to leave out of fear. This fear tactic was first implemented with some success during the 1948 war, when about 800,000 Palestinian Arabs fled their homes in Israel out of fear and were never allowed to return. 

The fact of the matter is, 7 million Jews live in Israel today. Though the land they live upon was acquired in bloodshed, getting rid of them will required even more bloodshed. The best peace solution is not to return to the fantasy of a pre-Zionist independent Palestine. It's as impossible as the Zionist fantasy to return to a pre-Roman independent mono-cultural Judea. Decades of immigration, expulsion, and blood has irrevocably scarred the region. 

My own fantasy is for a singular secular state that recognizes the religious and national identities that it contains. This state would also offer reparations to victims of the violence. Even though these reparations will be offered to Israelis who lost family and property in the violence, the vast majority of the recipients will be Palestinians who live both domestically and abroad, since they make up the vast majority of victims of the violence over the past century. I fear that such a state will be far too unstable to maintain itself. Maybe it could create a unifying peace narrative, but there will be significant pockets of Zionists who would want to maintain Jewish supremacy and the "right to return" for Jews globally. On the other side, there will be Palestinian Islamic nationalists who would want to start forcing Jews out of the country. The history of violence would encourage people to take up arms once again. 

Another possible solution, which is supported by the international community, is the two state solution. This is an old idea that dates back to the British mandate period. It has always been a messy solution, since the population distributions within historic Palestine do not lend well to simple divisions. In spite of the border drawing difficulties, two states would allow for the national expression of both groups. The very small territory would require them to cooperate very closely with each other, though there remains the great worry of violence re-erupting should extremists come to power on either side. 

I don't know which solution would ultimately work the best. I do know that we must be thinking pragmatically about how to accommodate a peaceful coexistence of both groups in the land without fantasizing about the extermination of one or the other. As long as our discourse tolerates such ideologies, it will be very difficult to reach a lasting peace agreement.     

Jacob Heller and Orthodox Jewish Anti-Zionism

In 1945 Jacob Heller sued Aharon Pechenik for libel on the accounts of Pechenik calling him a meshugane, a chassar deah, and that he belongs in a meshuganem hoiz. Heller claimed these terms amounted to calling him a lunatic and that he belonged in an insane asylum. Pechenik had used the terms in an editorial for the Mizrachi monthly magazine, Der Mizrachi Veg, to critique the politics of the young advocates of Agudas Yisrael and its anti-Zionist ideology, Heller was included as one of the more radical among these. The following articles were included as evidence in the court case, which can be found here. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Supreme_Court/dTDfs1FDu4YC?hl=en&gbpv=1 

Great Britain and the East, Oct. 31, 1942

Letters to the Editor

ORTHODOX JEWRY AND PALESTINE

Millions of religious Jews are unalterably opposed to the machinations in Palestine of the Zionists. The latter, after all, represent but a section of Jewry: They may not speak for all Israel. But all Israel is deeply concerned. Surely the views of the whole Jewish people, not those of a single organization alone, should be taken into account in any plans that are formulated.

One is inclined to ask: Who gave the Zionists authority to be the custodians and guardians and overseers in Palestine—a sort of extra government, an imperium in imperio? How long is their pernicious influence to be suffered? They seek the benefit of Zionism, not of Zion. Perhaps if they stopped trying from without to determine the destiny of Palestine, advantage would accrue to Palestine and to the Jews therein.

It is possible that Palestine will be divided into cantons; eventually it may be incorporated into the British Empire as a dominion (not, of course, as a specifically Jewish dominion) on the Quebec model of provincial autonomy for the two racial elements. In any arrangements that may be set up complete autonomy in internal Jewish affairs is forecast.

Are the Zionists to assume control then over Jewish affairs? This is of supreme significance to true, undiluted, independent Orthodox Jewry the world over, organized under the banner of Agudas Yisroel: it is, indeed, a matter of life or death. Orthodox Jews in Palestine are at this moment being ground under the heel of Zionist tyranny through the instrumentality of the Zionist Chief Rabbinate and the Zionist 'Jewish Community.' (There is in the Zionist Organization a fraction of religious Jews known as "Mizrachi," who are regarded by most Orthodox Jews as appeasers or fifth columnists or quislings in Orthodoxy. They do not merit serious consideration.)

Zionist in Palestine and in Europe and America has wrought untold confusion and damage in Jewry. Isaac Breuer declared that Zionism has become 'the most formidable enemy that ever arose to the Jewish People.' At the World Congress of Orthodoxy at Marienbad in August, 1937, H. A. Goodman cried out: "We must put an end to the criminal monopoly of the Zionists."

The British Government would certainly defer to the advice of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in religious questions. Palestine is essentially a religious question. Why, then, is it not guided by the wishes of the great rabbis, always the acknowledged leaders of Israel? Why does it turn to secular political Zionist spokesmen?

It made the mistake of not consulting the Arabs with regard to the Balfour declaration and the terms of the Mandate. Let it not make the mistake of not consulting the Agudas Yisroel with regards to the conduct of internal Jewish affairs in Palestine. Orthodox Jewry earnestly hopes that the Government will protect it from the evil devices of the Zionists. It asks independence for itself.

Jacob Heller, Boston, Massachusetts, U. S. A.

The Springfield Daily Republican, Oct. 10, 1944.

ZIONIST AND PALESTINE

Former's Position Adversely Criticized—British Policy Approved

To the Editor of The Republican:—

The Republican and Democratic parties should not have yielded to the pressure of the importunate Zionists and inserted a plank about Palestine in their platforms. Neither should hearings have been held before the House committee on foreign affairs on Palestine resolutions concocted by the Zionist henchmen. America should not be involved in Zionists delusions. Britain, despite the ungrateful, querulous Zionists, has done a magnificent job in Palestine; it is not for us to make her lot harder.

Britain, with admirable understanding, saw that the policy of the 'white paper' announced five years ago was imperative on economic, political and psychological grounds. Who is qualified to reprove her, to favor her with safe advice? The plain truth is that the white paper is a guarantee of the safety and security of the 530,000 Jews (many thousands of whom, by the way, are anti-Zionists) now resident in Palestine. Withdrawal of British bayonets would inevitably mean that the throats of these Jews would be cut over night. 

The vociferous Zionists, with their unpleasant, incessant propaganda, would turn Palestine into a huge concentration camps for Jews. They willfully forget that Palestine is a small, barren country without natural resources, and inhabited by Arabs (who form more than two-thirds of the population) for 1300 years. The Arabs—with reason—fear domination by the Zionists. The terrible plight of Jewry cannot be assuaged at the expense of the Arabs. The moral conscience of the world will not permit treatment of the Arabs that flouts the canons of democracy and fair play. This matter must be settled on the basis of justice, not of Zionism. Let the nations only show good will, and there is plenty of room throughout the world for Jewish refugees.

The Zionists and unfit for self-government. Their attitude toward their Jewish opponents alone proves this statement. The shocking tyranny exercised by the high-handed, lordly Zionists for a quarter of a century over the defenseless, inarticulate Orthodox Jews in Palestine is a tale that needs telling. Such brutal persecution of people because of their adherence to the principles of a great faith—their reduction to helotry—can be matched only in Hitlerdom. 

There will be no Jewish (read "Zionist") state in Palestine. The Jewish population there will never rise to 51 per cent. The Zionists will resign themselves to the status of a permanent minority. The Arabs will be the masters in Palestine. The Jews' rights will be protected by the nations. Possibly the Holy Land, because of its peculiar interest to three religions, will be placed under and international trusteeship.

Let us wake up and face reality. Zionism is not a blessing to Jews or to non-Jews. Hundreds of thousands of solid substantial Jews are vigorously and unalterably opposed to this crass, materialistic, secular nationalism. And there is the grave problem whether it shall be permitted to create unrest and disturbance in the Near East, thereby upsetting the peace of the world. Is it not high time that Zionism be liquidated?

Jacob Heller, Boston, Oct. 8, 1944.

The Springfield Daily Republican, Oct. 17, 1944.

ZIONISTS AND ORTHODOX

Differences of Jewish Opinion Regarding Palestine

To the Editor of The Republican:—

The non-Jewish public, at the mercy of Zionist propaganda, is often, by statements in the press regarding the so-called 'Jewish agency,' led to believe that the body speaks for the Jews of the Holy Land (else why would it 'demand' the right to control Jewish immigration thereto?), if not of the world. This is an entirely erroneous conception. This agency is not Jewish, but Zionist; it is not representative and cannot pretend to be spokesman for Jewry.

In this connection, I should like to quote from a recent article by Jacob Rosenheim, president of Agudas Yisroel, the powerful international organization of Orthodox Jewry: "The one-sided, illegal, party character of this official body, that according to the unambiguous stipulations of the (Palestine) mandate was to secure 'the cooperation of all Jews willing to assist in the establishment of a Jewish national home,' has been revealed to a disastrous degree in the experience of the last few years . . . The agency under its present constitution does not deserve any confidence or support . . . This state of things cannot be allowed to continue. Non-Zionist Jewry and Orthodoxy above all heave a legal and moral claim before the allied nations not to suffer any longer a Zionist party-dictatorship under the deceptive name of a 'Jewish agency for Palestine.' A basic reconstitution of this Jewish agency must be enforced, limiting at the outset its competence and power to purely political economic and social matters (excluding disputed cultural and religious matters) and then securing—on the footing of equality—the cooperation of all Jews willing to assist in the establishment of a Jewish national home. The near future will show whether an internal Jewish understanding of this basis is possible or whether a protracted battle for emancipation among Jews themselves is inevitable."

Further comment is superfluous, Mr. Rosenheim, who for 40 years has enjoyed the confidence of the outstanding rabbinical luminaries, writes with restraint. If Americans were made aware of the unfair and abhorrent tactics to which this agency has repeatedly stooped in its ferocious eagerness to strangle Orthodox Judaism—and all this will the unconscious help of Britain—they would shudder with loathing. 

Jacob Heller, Boston, Oct. 15, 1944.

Der Mizrachi Veg, December 1944.

LIGHT AND SHADOW

From Newspapers and Periodicals

Efforts to Provoke Conflict—Mask of Nonpartisanship—A judgement of Maimonides—'Arguments' of and Ignoramus—In a Temple—Solace from the Poale Agudat Mizrachi—An Agudah Rabbi Preaches Zionism—Repentant Declarations from the Leftist Camp—Were it Not For Mizrachi—

By A. Halevi [Aharon Pechenik]

From all sides we receive inquiries as to our reason for devoting so much interest to the attacks of the Agudat Israel, and for creating so much ado over them at a time when they possess no significance in American Jewish Life, and when comments only create publicity for them. All those bringing this matter to our attention are quite correct; but it is precisely because these people have no significance and no responsibility and have nothing to lose through public expression of opinion, that the few young men occupied with the Agudat Israel in America can permit themselves to write whatever their hearts desire, and, as it were, to provoke quarrel in American Orthodoxy. It is this fact that must be brought to the attention of the Jewish public.

That they themselves are aware of their complete lack of value or significance in America can be seen from their machinations on two fronts. On the one hand, it is sought to besmirch Mizrachists in the press; naive writers are caught by this bait, and the quarrel between Mizrachi and the Agudah is taken up as an indication that not alone among others, but also among pious kosher Jews, is there general bickering . . . On the other hand, however, when it comes to practical work, they know well that they public cannot be fooled, and it is clear to all that the Agudat Israel is unable to point to any actual accomplishments either in America or Palestine; on this account they try to cover themselves under a mask of non-partisanship. Thys, the Beth Jacob schools were known in Poland as Agudah institutions; but here they are averse to making official acknowledgement that they are in any way connected with the Agudah, since the use of that name would be no great praise for them . . . Therefore the Agudats seeks to draw Mizrachi leaders into conflict, while loudly proclaiming their non-partisanship. The same applied to their Torah u-Mesorah, their rescue campaigns, and the others. They include in their roster the names of several Mizrachists, who cannot every day protest the misuse of their names; and they then proclaim in the public places that their lack of partisanship is proven by the Mizrachists who seem to be with them. 

And while we are discussing their aims of provoking warfare and dissension in Orthodoxy, let us present several out of many examples. One of their young men, who has pretensions to being a rabbi and pedagogue, and who holds a position in a yeshivah supported by Mizrachists, blossomed forth in the 'Forward' with an article studded with lies and inanities concerning Mizrachi. This article, under two large captions—'Mizrachi and Agudat Israel—What Is Their Quarrel About?' and 'The Schism in the Orthodox World'—and signed by the pseudonym, A. B. Ruthson, had the following among its pearls: 'Mizrachi maintains the principles taught by the constitution of Zionism; and when the Torah comes into conflict with Zionism, the final law remains in consonance with Zionist dictates. This has created the schism between the Agudat Israel and Mizrachi.' One can readily comprehend the cheap ignorantism fed to the readers of the 'Forward'—that the illustrious scholars, Rabbis H. L. Woloshiner, Samuel Mohilever, I. J. Reines, and A. I. Kook, of blessed memory, and their living compeer, Chief Rabbi Dr. Isaac Herzog—that all these, the great spiritual leaders of Mizrachi, place the constitution of Zionism about the holy Law! Any child acquainted with the ABC of Mizrachi and Zionism knows the elementary fact that the Mizrachi Organization came in existence only in 1902 at the Fifth Zionist Congress, when Orthodoxy severed itself from the main body on the questions of Torah and culture; and that since that time it has gone its own way in all matters of Torah wherein other Zionists have opposing opinions. But Mizrachi always joins other Zionists in general political and economic matters, in accordance with the ordinance of the Law forbidding full severance from the generality of Israel. The sages teach that any prescribed fast-day not also observed by sinner in Israel is not considered a valid fast-day. This is not a fanciful statement lending itself to various interpretation, but a definite legal principle posited by Maimonides, that in Israel's community affairs one must proceed together even with sinners.

To comment on all the absurdities in this article would require ten times its own space. One can only refer to such as: 'Dr. Herzl drew a black line through all of Jewish history when he declared. "Zionism has no relationship with the Jewish religion."' Thus novel expression of ignorance indicates that the young writer had never perused Herzl's writings. For therein he would have discovered scores of positive statements, such as, 'Zionism means, above all, the return to Judaism,' and the end of his book 'Altneuland,' where realization of the dream of Zionism is ascribed to the Master of the universe . . . And had the young man read only what his own leaders wrote, he would have known what the ideological leader of the Agudat Israel, Dr. Isaac Breuer, set down about Herzl—that he was a great Jew and an agent of Divine Providence. And had he read further what Dr. Breuer wrote concerning the ugly discomfiture and bankruptcy of the Agudah ideology, he might never have composed this article. 

Here is but one more pearl from this piece: 'For this reason the Agudat Israel did not attend the Jewish (read Zionist) Conference which took place last year in New York, because the Conference gave prominency only to demonstrations in favor of Palestine, and gave insufficient expression to the agony of European Jewry.' Everyone knows how much truth there is in this statement, but it is curious that the Agudah knew in advance that the Conference would occupy itself only with Palestine—all of which is in full accord with the saying of the sages: 'From the day that the Temple was destroyed, the art of prophesy was granted only to fools.'

And while we are on the subject of Agudah provocation, may we be permitted to refer to another product of the Agudah—one Jacob Heller, who evidently is a resident of Boston, and with whom we have previously dealt in the pages of The Mizrachi Weg. This man has made himself known, with his provocative informations against Zionists and Zionism, to the London Colonial Office; and the organ of the Agudah zealots in Jerusalem, Kol Israel, has published his work quite frequently. Recently this Jacob Heller fastened himself upon the English daily, the Springfield Daily Republican, to which he carried his provocations. He writes therein that England is justified in instituting the White Paper, and that if the Zionists were to attain power over Palestine they would immediately transform the land into a great concentration camp; also that the Arabs are the majority there and to them belongs the land; and that places can be found elsewhere for the Jewish refugees; and so on.

Further does this Jacob Heller declare in his pieces for the English newspaper, that the enslavement of the Orthodox Jews in Palestine through the Zionists can only be likened to Hitlerism; and that the Jewish Agency represents no one, adducing proof therefor from an article by Jacob Rosenheim, 'president of the powerful international orthodox organization, the Agudah Israel' (so writes Jacob Heller), in which Rosenheim 'openly' asserts that non-Zionist dictatorship'—and the like.

We have taken the trouble to present quotations of all the 'arguments' this Jacob Heller had adduced before the non-Jewish world, but entirely with the favoring purpose that we cannot pass adverse judgement upon him insomuch as we are dealing with a person of confused mind . . . But if so, why does the Agudah permit him to speak in its name, and why is he not confined to an asylum, to prevent him sending his accusations and treacherous writings to the non-Jewish newspapers?

Nevertheless, to be honest and objective, we must admit that not all active Agudists have crept into such impasses as have their local representatives. We have already quoted Dr. Isaac Breuer, and other of their workers in Palestine who joined in open combat with the so-called 'Universal Agudat Israel.' Well remembered is the revolt of the 'Poale Agudat Israel,' who could not wait until the Agudat Israel should do something in the Holy Land, hence wen the way of Mizrachi and established their colonies on National Fund land under a budget derived from Zionist funds. And we have had true solace from the Poale Agudat Israel. They recently held a conference in Petach Tikvah and in the village Saba, at which Chief Rabbi Herzog delivered an extended address, and, according to press reports, at which there reigned a feeling of amity toward Mizrachi. A. J. Goldroth, a leader of the Poale Agudat Israel, asserted: 'Instead of the general organization of the Agudat Israel devoting themselves earnestly to assisting the Poale Agudat Israel in its labor and colonization projects, they concern themselves only with their divisiveness among Jews and with creating sundered communities . . .' The Palestine press also reports an address at the National Fund conference held last September on Mount Scopus, by a representative of the Hapoel Agudat Israel colony 'Hafez Hayyim;' 'I have the honor today to take part in this national conference as a representative of the new colony Hafetz Hayyim of the Poale Agudat Israel, just established on National Fund soil. We thank God that we have become partners of all those building up our Holy Land . . . May it be His will that we bring good fortune and serve as exemplars to all the members of the Agudat Israel, so that they too may become partners in the upbuilding of our Holy Land, to assure the continued existence of our people now suffering and bleeding in such fearful agony.'

And to round out the picture, let us quote from an article by one of the few American rabbis who have offered their names as members and actives workers of the Agudat Israel. This is Dr. Leo Jung, who writes as follows in Talpioth: 'The present period is an nationalistic one to an unprecedented degree, but this nationalism displays a valuable attribute for our inner life. Zionism has taught all Jews the central importance of our Holy Land, and has completely electrified Jewish energies. Together with anti-Semitism, Zionism has become a significant factor in turning many Jews back to their people and there is added hope that they will also return to Judaism. On this road one sees perspective of Zionism helping to develop in Jewish hearts that faith which will hold back the stream of assimilation by means of a religious revival and through the revival of Hebrew literature. Through Zionism we shall be enabled to transform the American chaoticism into an American Judaism that will be strong and established and create a milieu that will prove a splendid proliferation of our past . . .'

Where now stands the A. B. Ruthson and the other combative Agudists, who still carry on their foolish attacks and conflicts?

Finally, may we be permitted to quote from the other opposition camp, which also gives evidence of incidental Mizrachi influence, and of the expressions of repentance which seem to have captured the entire camp of Israel. In the Poale Zion publications (Yiddisher Kempfer, Verband Stimme) there was prominently published an impassioned appeal in favor of the Sabbath by M. Moshevitzky, who demands discontinuance of the secular meetings held each Friday night—'A Friday evening gathering should be permeated with the spirit of holiness and with Sabbath sentiment.' Pleads the writer further: 'From the Jewish homes and their windows there must gleam and resound the greeting accorded the Sabbath Queen!' To this we give hearty assent. For long years we have hammered away in our publications and everywhere against the Sabbath desecration of the Poale Zion, and we trust that the emotional appeal in their own paper will have its effect. Incidentally, that appeal was that appeal was reprinted and quoted in many other periodicals. 

Dr. Simon Bernstein, noted Zionist and author, writes in Das Yiddishe Folk, organ of the Zionist Organization of America: 'It is the present task of American Jews not along to succor Jews throughout the world, but also Jewishness among themselves . . . American Jews must themselves become more Jewish, must be the kind of Jews upon whom we could fully rely in previous generations—this is the new responsibility devolving upon American Jewry. It must be clear to everyone, young or old, that from now on upon him alone lies the responsibility for maintaining Judaism, for prolonging the life of Judaism . . .'

Dr. Bernstein, discussing the duties and tasks of Zionism in America, ends: 'No matter how important this may be, it is only part of the general tremendous task before us of returning to Judaism, to Jewishness. The old generation as well as the young must be yoked together in the duty of assuring our continuity as a people, with its own Law, tradition, and Land. Basle and Sinai must be united for all time!'

We can add dozens of such citations from the Palestine press. For lack of space, however, we shall content ourselves with excerpts from an address by A. Lieberstein under the auspices of Mapai, the leftist workers' organization in Palestine: 'We must serve as example for our remnants in Europe, and for the Jewish masses in exilic lands who are threatened by assimilation. We must return to our old tradition, to the Bible and the Jewish Sabbaths and holy day; and thereby we shall avoid the peril of assimilation throughout the world. It is no accident that the colonies of Hachalutz (The Pioneer) in England have resolved to observe the Sabbath and all Jewish traditions, and that their kitchens should be completely kosher. We must prepare along these lines all our representatives that travel to Europe . . .'

Not for naught did the Chief Rabbi of Palestine declare that to evaluate Mizrachi properly one must try to envision Palestine without Mizrachi . . . And the writer of these lines has heard Rabbi J. L. Seltzer, leader and honorary president of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, utter similar words at a Mizrachi convention—'We cannot envisage the existence of orthodox Judaism in America without Mizrachi . . .'

On Revisionist Zionist Ideology

After a brief discussion of the ethics of placing the phrase ה' ינקום דמו (God avenge his blood) at the end of the name of a deceased when זכרונו לברכה (May his memory be a blessing) for victims of terror attacks in Israel, I decided to look up historical uses of the phrase. One example was quite apropos for the discussion since it explicitly and proudly explained the violent undertones of "God avenge his blood," and the potential for such lines of thought to unnecessarily extend the bloodshed in Israel-Palestine conflict. (Which of course is not really a conflict at this point, but violence between a colonizer and the brutalized and colonized people.)

The Revisionist Zionist movement broke away from the World Zionist Organization in 1935 to form its own New Zionist Organization. The goal was to fight against the conciliatory advocacy of mainstream leaders David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weitzman who gave up claims to the Trans-Jordan territory and did not protest when the British made it an independent state. 

The New Zionist Organization's official Yiddish language newspaper was called Unzer Velt (Our World.) In its first issue, which came out in September 1936, there was a short editorial titled Yizkor. The word Yizkor literally means "May he remember" and refers to a traditional Jewish prayer which begins with the word and serves to memorialize the deceased on the anniversary of their passing. The NZO had its own twist on how to best memorialize the dead. The editorial attempts to argue that the traditional Jewish method of remembering the dead, through prayer, is wrong. Drawing from some biblical language and the traditional method of referring to martyrs, "God avenge his blood," the editorial argues the validity of a Jewish tradition of revenge for the murdered members of its community. The editorial does not restrain itself from the logical conclusion, the only true yizkor that will properly honor the souls of the deceased will be proactive self-defense (i.e. more violence in revenge.) 

יזכור! . . .

די ערשטע שורות אין דער בּאַנייטער "אונזער וועלט" דאַרפן זיין געווידמעט אָט די יידן, וואָס זענען אומגעקומען אין משך פון דעם פּערמאַנענטן פּאָגראָם, וועלכער דויערט אין א"י שוין אַ גאַנץ האַלבּ יאָר נאָכאַנאַנד.

מיר וועלן קיין סך נישט רעדן וועגן אונזערע געפאַלענע. דער טויט זייערע האָט נישט געבּראַכט קיין איבּעריקן כבוד דעם יידישן פאָלק. דער גרעסטער רוב פון זיי איז אומגעקומען נישט מיט קיין העלדן - טויט — ווייט נישט אַזוי ווי די גבורים פון גאַליפּאלי און תל-חי. עס איז אויך דאָ נישט דאָס אָרט צו מאַכן אַ חשבּון מיט די, וואָס זענען געווען געוווינט אָנצורייצן וואָוקאָפּס פּאָליציי אויף אונזער יוגנט.

עס איז איצט די צייט פון יזכור...

ובכן, יזכור — געדענקען זאָל אונזער פאָלק די אַלע, וואָס האָבּן געזעטיקט מיט זייער בּלוט דעם בּאָדן פון אונזער חרוב היימלאַנד. זאָל דאָס פאַרגאָסענע בּלוט אונזערס נישט איינרוען בּיז וואַנען עס וועט נישט אויפשטיין אונזער יוגנט און אַראָפּנעמען פונם יידישן פאָלק די חרפּה, — די חרפּה פון פאַרגאָסענעם בּלוט, פאַר וועלכן עס ווערט נישט גענומען קיין נקמה.

און נקמה איז דאָך אַ געבּאָט פון דער תורה: "מחה תמחה זכר עמלק" — שטייט געשריבּן. אויך די יידישע מסורה גיט-צו צום נאָמען פון יעדן קדוש די ווערטער: הי"ד — ה' ינקום דמו!

בּכן, נישט טרערן וועלן מיר פאַרגיסן אויף די קברים פון אונזערע קדושים און גבּורים. נישט דערצו ווערט איר גערופן, איר יידישע יוגנטעלעכע אייניקלעך פון יהושע בּן-נון, יואב בּן צרויה, יהודה במכבּי און בּאַש צער פון מסדה און בּיתר. ניין, נישט צו לאָזן רינען דיינע טרערן ווערסטו יידישע יונגט גערופן, נאָר צו בּאַשיצן און פאַרטיידיקן דיין פאָלק און דיין לאַנד!

יידישע יוגנט: לאָז זיך נישט איינרעדן, אַז נקמה - געפילן זענען אונז פרעמד. פריש אויף אין זכרון: "עין תחת עין", "שן תחת שן"!

Yizkor!...

The first lines in the renewed “Our World” need to be inscribed on the Jews that are continuously perishing in the permanent pogrom, that has continued in Palestine for half a year one after the other. 

We will not speak at all out our fallen. The dead have not brought any extra honor to the Jewish people. The large majority of them did not perish with any heroism - dead — not too different from the heroes of Gallipoli and Tel-Hai. It is also not the place to make a calculation for these, who were living without stirring up Wauchope’s police for our youth.

It is now the time of yizkor…

So, yizkor — remember, our people should remember all whose blood satiated the soil of our ruined homeland. Should our spilled blood not rest until where it will not raise up our youth and remove from the Jewish people the shame, — the shame of spilled blood, for which it would not take any revenge.

And revenge is after all a command from the Torah: “You shall surely erase [sic] memory of Amalek” — its is written. Also the Jewish tradition adds to them names of every martyr the words: “God avenge his blood!”

So, we will not spill any tears on the graves of our martyrs and heroes. For that you are not called Jewish youthful grandchildren of Yehoshua bin-Nun, Yoav ben Tsruya, Yehuda haMakabi, and Bash Tser [sic] of Masada and Beitar. No, not to let tears flow were you called a Jewish youth, but to protect and defend your people and your land!

Jewish youth: Do not be persuaded, that revenge feels foreign to us. Make it fresh in your memory: “An eye for an eye,” “A tooth for a tooth!”

https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/unzerwlt/1936/09/16/01/article/16

Thoughts on a Speech From a Member of Zak"a

In modern day Israel, in response to the increasing amount terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, a group of haredi civilian paramedics created a Chesed shel Emet organization to manage the identification and burial of the mutilated bodies from these attacks. As many of the attacks in the 1990s and 2000s were suicide bombings, the bodies of the victims were often in pieces and difficult to identify. 

Traditionally, a Chesed shel Emet organization manages the burial of people who's family's cannot afford their burial. The core value behind the organization is that all Jews deserve to be buried according the Jewish customs whether or not they can afford it. The innovation of Zaka was that they would specialize in collecting the body parts of the victims of gruesome terrorist attacks and also identifying who the body parts belonged to. From this the organization got its name, Zaka, which is an acronym for zihui korbanot ason, or terrorist attack victims identification. 

Zaka fills an important niche in the emergency response to terrorist attacks in the country. Generally civilian EMS are only trained to collect generally in tact corpses, while the army coroners can deal with identifying are collecting the mutilated remains of its soldiers since each soldier has a detailed medical record that can be quickly referenced for identification of the body. Zaka specializes in mangled civilian bodies who are more difficult to identify quickly since detailed medical records are harder to get on short notice. 

Zaka was born out of the haredi community's volunteer EMS service, hatzala, which means that all Zaka personnel are volunteers since the organization operates on much the same model of dispatching. 

Yesterday, on Nov. 21, 2023, the day that all the YU student organizations planned something. (and i mean all, there were like 7 events all planned at about the same time that night, it was kind of wild, but they all wanted to get events done before Thanksgiving.) A senior member of Zaka from Ashdod visited YU on his fundraising tour. Though not mentioned so directly during his talk, the money he was collecting seemed to be intended to fund mental health treatment for all the volunteers who assisted in collecting and identifying the victims of the October 7th massacres. Though I presume Zaka probably needed funding to also generally replenish their supplies that we no doubt exhausted. 

The dynamic of him fundraising felt a little uncomfortable to me, since he had to relive the horrors he witnessed while cleaning up in order to evoke our pity to donate to his organization. Of course he probably agreed out of his own free will and dedication to his noble organization, but nevertheless the dynamic seemed a little improper. The memories of the events should definitely be relayed, but they shouldn't be bought. Though I will stress that I assume the person who spoke volunteered to do this and was more than willing to relay his experiences, the principle of matter is what seems to be slightly bothering me.

I'll put my cynical criticism here in the middle, because I want to end on a more wholesome perspective. Almost all the people who I have heard discuss the current situation in the Jewish community point to a situation of great unity or achdut. However, each faction of Israeli Jewish society is optimistic that the other factions will soften their hardline stance on certain issues. When I heard from the rabbis who visited from Har Eztion, they were optimistic that the charedim would become more willing to serve in the army and support the nationalist vision of a Jewish future. The member of Zaka was himself charedi and his perspective was a little different. The charedim see their main opponents as the secular Jews who are trying to remove the religious aspects of general government policy like allowing public transportation to run on shabbat and the like. After interacting with the some of the relatives of the victims who were secular, he felt hopeful that they would adopt a more open attitude to their charedi neighbors and potentially become more connected to Orthodox Judaism. The Zaka member even requested that we try to donate a Sefer Torah to the secular kibbutsim who were attacked to assist them in the process of returning to religion. 

As part of his address, the Zaka member relayed some of his memories of what happened on October 7 and his team's involvement in the recovery of bodies. I do not remember all the details that relayed, and I don't really want to get too graphic, especially since he was clearly self censoring and not relaying the most disturbing of the details. One of the analogies he used to describe what it was like to enter the houses of the people who were murdered was that the bodies and the walls of the houses talked to you. He repeated this several times. It struck me because this is exactly how Disco Elysium portrays the experience of examining and identifying the mangled corpse of a murdered person. This Zaka member and the writers of Disco Elysium never interacted, so at that moment I knew that the Disco Elysium writers had that seen spot on. They clearly were writing from experience of what its like to examine a corpse like that. Unless I enter a profession that professionally deals with victims of murder, I will never be able to really understand what the person from Zaka or what Disco Elysium meant by the analogy. However, I suspect that when you observe a corpse in situ, exactly at is was when its life was brutally ripped from it, you can immediately spot the clues of how it happened. Whether or not your immediate conclusions of how the murder happened are correct, the bodies and the spilled blood still talk to you, they are trying to explain how it was that they ended up in this mess, but they are mute, for dead man can no longer speak, their lips are frozen. 

The next detail was one that I get very emotional thinking about. Part of Zaka's protocol is to collect all pieces of human remains, included residue of blood to be buried in the ground according to Jewish law. While they clean and collect the blood and other dismembered body parts, they also work to clean the house to restore it to a livable condition. Apparently, in one house while they were cleaning, one the Zaka team members complained, what's the point of cleaning up this house. The team leader who visited YU responded that the point was to collect the blood to bring it to kever yisrael (Jewish burial) and to allow the family to return to the house. He responded, they're all dead, there's no one to return to the house.

And if someone’s kinsman . . . comes to carry the remains out of the house, and he calls to the one at the rear of the house, “Are there any alive besides you?” the answer will be, “No, none.” And he will say, “Hush!”—so that no one may utter GOD’s name. (Amos 6:10)

A Rant on Jewish Nationalism

Nationalism began to emerge in the 19th century as a method for creating cohesive modern states. The feeling among the leadership of post revolutionary France was such that a united French national character had to be engraved upon the hearts of all residents of the newly modernized country. A significant portion of the nationalistic idea is tied the concept of nation states made up of one ethnicity or nation. Ethnic groups within multi-ethnic empires began adapting this notion of the nation state as an argument for why they should have self determination.

The impulse to break up oppressive empires was and remains laudable. Allowing territories within an empire the ability to develop democratic self-rule leads to better governance and is a much more moral method of appointing the people to serve in government. Many of the independence movements of 1848 and later rallied around an idea of nationalism as a liberating concept. All the people in this area of the empire deserve to be their own self-governing state.

Towards the 1870s, we witness the development of nationalism as a method of unifying small countries within a larger ethnic group. Italy and Germany's nationalism developed in this way after the two countries were formed out of unifying many small countries that housed people of the same ethnic group. Around the time of WWI, the Arabs considered the idea of a pan-Arab nationalism, though such a pan-Arab state never materialized. 

All these different streams of nationalism encounter a fundamental problem. There never was and never will be an ethnically homogenous country. How do ethnic minorities integrate in a Nationalism context. Especially ethnic groups that are dispersed internationally. In Europe there were Roma people and Jews living in almost every country. Does the nationalism absorb these minorities into the general nation or are they excluded legally or socially from being members of the nation of the nation state. Though there was initial optimism that these minorities would get integrated into the national identity of their respective countries. 

Democracy is of the people, by the people, and for the people, but the people are stupid. The people are highly antisemitic, and nothing united the European economic classes quite like antisemitism. A useful tool in creating unity in all kinds of contexts, it unified by excluding everyone's primary object of hatred, the Jewish community. The roots of antisemitism stretch back remarkably far, so the mere ideal of national unity was not going to destroy it. Rather the empowering of regular people to get involved in politics somewhat increased outright antisemitism, since monarchs generally discouraged messy antisemitism as a destabilizing force in pre-modern and medieval societies. The modern voters of the 19th century felt the benefit of institutional antisemitism was much better than the risk mob violence posed to the economy or general society. 

Jewish intellectuals, mainly in Eastern Europe where their marginalization from society was felt strongest, proposed a development in the concept of nationalism. What if you could develop a Jewish nation to advocate on behalf of the Jews since clearly the German, the French, and the Russian states were really failing to properly integrate their Jewish communities. (There was also a bit of anxiety over the possibility of proper integration that would lead to the complete vanishing of the Jewish people through assimilation.) A Jewish nationalism would be a modern way of connecting to Jewish identity that non-religious people could still engage with, and if successful, a Jewish national government would be able to reliably advocate for the welfare of Jewish communities abroad. Most Jews supported a territorial nationalism in the sense that the Jewish nation state would be a proper state with its own territory. Functionally speaking the Jewish communities were too scattered to have any real Jewish territory around.

The Jewish nationalist movement needed to create a shared piece of land for all the Jews to have territorial sovereignty over, the less popular ideas of Jewish autonomism that didn't believe in governing a particular territory seemed too unrealistic. To gather support and legitimacy for a Jewish land, the nationalists turned the to the historic homeland of the Jews, Palestine. Perhaps the more assimilated Jews would have read in the antisemitic magazines of the era that were calling upon Jews to return to their middle-eastern homeland, or perhaps they drew their inspiration for the messianic literature of traditional Jewish religion. But the Zionists, whether secular or religious in philosophical orientation, had their eyes set on Palestine.

In order to reclaim the land, they needed to settle it. Many of the western European Zionists treated it as a contemporary colonization project. They would move to the land as Capitalists, establishing a European Jewish bourgeoisie. These early settlers created agricultural industry that often employed native labor who had expertise in farming in the Palestinian climate. Eastern European Zionists, being more influenced by Marxist economic ideas refused to reestablish Jewish life in Palestine as a bourgeoisie owning class. They were going to only use Jewish labor, and that would mean adopting socialist and planned economy practices to ensure the stability of their small independent economic enclave within Arab Palestinian society. 

Overtime the Zionist settlement in Palestine, the yishuv hachadash, would grow in both numbers and in strength and succeed in getting the United Nations to recognize it as a sovereign nation in the 1947 Palestine partition plan. The Jewish communities globally were ecstatic. No more would the Jews be subject to the whims of nationalism regimes that marginalized them. Finally today, in 1947, Jews could be part of the world as a people with a nation state to advocate for them. The Jews living in a nation comprised entirely of their peers would be safe from antisemitism. 

This idea persists in aliyah narratives to this day. One Ra"m, speaking at the 2023 Har Etzion alumni Shabbaton in Teaneck, NJ, commented how moving to Israel was a healing process in which he shed his insecurities and biases that he gained living in galut, in exile (i.e. the diaspora). He compared growing up in Long Beach, NY, in the United States, to growing up in a home with emotionally absent parents. Upon moving to Israel, his exposure to native born Israeli Jews was healing process in which he recovered from the trauma induced by living in such a fundamentally antisemitic society. 

But there's a problem. Israel is not a utopia. Ethnic violence has raged there on and off since the British mandate. I don't need to carefully check the numbers, in Israel in the present day, a Jew is at greatest risk of dying out of antisemitism. In recent decades, Hamas and other Palestinian Islamic Jihad groups have encouraged their followers to conduct suicide bombing, to fire rockets into Israeli civilian areas to stab Jews with intent to kill in public areas. Such a level of popular violence is not seen in even the most antisemitic countries in Europe. 

The harshness of the present day violence in Israel has been overshadowed by the Holocaust. These deaths are seen as martyrs and heroes who are small sacrifices in a larger positive movement in world where the exiled Jew is reborn and brought home where he can honorably defend himself. There feels like some change in the air. The official authorities are calling the attack on October 7th, the most deadly day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. Now, I won't delude myself, the purpose of this statement is to frame Hamas and by extension the residents of Gaza as Nazis, which justifies the harsh counter offensive currently underway. Nevertheless, it opens us to realize that the country in which 1400 Jews died in one day, in what is probably best compared to a pogrom, was not Ukraine or Russia, as was the case since the days of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, until the pogrom of Kielce in 1946. Nor was it in the United States, whose dense Jewish communities rival in size the Jewish population of the state of Israel. No, it was in the haven, the refuge for the persecuted Jew, the modern State of Israel.  

Israel serves quite well as a haven for the Jews persecuted by the specter of nationalisms that marginalize the Jewish residents of their motherland. Perhaps unintentionally, the state of Israel has recklessly allowed another form of antisemitism to brew. To gain traction and legitimacy. This antisemitism is like that of the Orthodox Christian Ukrainian peasants who labored under the boot of their Polish Catholic colonizers. The distant Polish nobility had no interest in directly managing their estates in the conquered provinces. Instead they contracted Jewish notables to manage the land directly. The Arenda system, in which Jews were placed in a marginally high position of power for the first time since the Roman empire. Both the Christians and Muslims had made it illegal for Jews to own slaves in their respective territories, but the Polish crown had found a way to give the Jews slaves once again. Effectively, the Jews were a buffer that allowed the Polish nobility to distance themselves from the mistreatment of the peasants who worked their land. When the peasants revolted in 1648, they targeted the Jews who were settled in their native territories. Some of the Polish generals who were sent to quell the rebellion weren't too fond of Jews either and turned over the Jews they were supposed to be protecting to the rebellious forces of Khmelnytsky. 

The project of the Zionist colonization of Palestine has an ugly secret. It was built on displacing many of Arab residents who once occupied its territory. During the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate, the Zionist settlers would buy the land that they settled on. They set up large funds to manage the purchase and ownership of this land. In the beginning the settlers were more than happy to higher local agricultural workers who were already familiar with best practices in the Palestinian climate. The later National Socialist settlers who believed in creating a new Jewish proletariat refused to higher Arab workers. The intended effect of this system was that it created an independent Jewish economic enclave within the British mandate. 

Practically, it broke the traditional system of leases and residency in Palestinian society. Land could change hands many times, but generally the new owners would continue to lease the land to the local peasants/farmworkers or higher them to work on the new owner's farm. By insisting on using only Jewish labor, the collectivist agricultural settlements that the Zionists created would marginalize the local peasants from the economy, depriving them of jobs and slowly displacing them as they would move to growing Arab urban areas to find better prospects. 

The next step of expulsion was in the 1948 war. Some historians argue that the violent expulsions in 1948 were part of a master plan to rid the nascent Jewish state of its Arab majority, though in practice the expulsions were carried out somewhat uncoordinated by independently acting militias and military groups. Massacres like the one at Dir Yassin scared Palestinian civilians once they realized the extent of the cruelty that Jewish nationalist para-military groups were capable of. Sometimes the Palestinians would flee of their own volition while others were actively removed by Israeli military groups. The end result of the uncoordinated operation was that by the end of the war almost 800,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in that were located in the newly sovereign Jewish state.

Israel's ultimate preference for their absence was made clear when the new country outright refused to allow the refugees to return home, while resettling a similar number of Jewish refugees in their country. The refugee problem persists. As much as Zionists would wish it would go away and some other country to resettle the Palestinians, it won't happen. Unfortunately, the Jewish people are not the United States, we will have to face the consequences of our actions. Though some may mourn our ability to relive the mythic glorious conquests of Joshua and King David, that era is by-gone. Even the Prophets tell us outright, King David's hand were too bloody to build God's temple. In order for us to merit a peaceful existence in the land we must work out a peaceful compromise. Though we like to blame Palestinian leadership for refusing to make peace, it takes two to tango and the Likud party has been a fierce and consistent opponent of any peace negotiations since the concept was proposed.

We should not think of a peaceful compromise as a failure of Jewish strength to retake the homeland. Though our passion for justice and nationalism runs deep, our sages of old remind us, "Who is the hero? He who conquers his desires." We have to consider the peacemaker, the compromiser as the true hero. It takes much strength to be so vulnerable. Though we may think such ideas of peacemaking be altruistic and impossible, they are necessary for our survival. Either we compromise to end hostilities, or the spirit of the beleaguered Palestinians will radicalize until it destabilizes the Jewish state, threatening anyone there. We'd much rather ensure that the moderates who believe in allowing the Jews to remain in the land are in political control and not the radical antisemites who wish to expel them. 

A compromise that is either a two state solution or a one state solution will not be easy, but it is the more moral thing to do in this situation, and with God's help, the merit of righteousness will protect us. 

אם יתמהמה חכה לו כי בא יבוא לא יאחר    

Bibliography for 1993 Israel Day Parade

Norman Lamm, “The New Dispensation On Homosexuality: A Jewish Reaction to a Developing Christian Attitude,” Jewish Life, Jan. 1968.

Marc Angel, Hillel Goldberg and Pinchas Stolper, “Homosexuality and the Orthodox Jewish Community,” Jewish Action, Dec. 1992.

Shawn G. Kennedy, “Gay Synagogue Seeks to March in Salute to Israel,” New York Times (New York, NY), March 23, 1993.

Dennis Hevesi, “Predominantly Gay Synagogue Won't March Without Banner,” New York Times (New York, NY), March 31, 1993.

“Should Gays March in Israel Day Parade,” Jewish Post & Opinion (Indianapolis, IN), March 31, 1993.  

Debra Nussbaum Cohen, “N.Y.’s Gay Synagogue Won’t March in Israel Parade Without Banner,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (New York, NY), April 1, 1993.  

Shawn G. Kennedy, “Israel Parade To Include A Gay Group,” New York Times (New York, NY), April 21, 1993.  

Eric Creizman. “Lamm Addresses Controversial Issues at Dorm Talks.” The Commentator (New York, NY), April 28, 1993. [page 4]

Gene Alperovich, “Parade Participation Awaits Decision on Gays,” The Commentator (New York, NY), April 28, 1993. [page 19]  

Alex Witchel, “Luckiest Rabbi In America' Holds Faith Amid the Hate,” New York Times (New York, NY), May 5, 1993.  

Larry Yudelson, “N.Y. Orthodox Community Divided on Marching in Israel Day Parade,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (New York, NY), May 5, 1993.  

Alan Finder, “Another Parade Furor: Salute to Israel Uninvites Gay Group Israel Salute Uninvites Gay Group,” New York Times (New York, NY), May 8, 1993.  

Jacques Steinberg, “Gay Dispute Fails to Dim Israel Parade: 73,000 Spectators Cheer Jewish State,” New York Times (New York, NY), May 10, 1993.  

Larry Yudelson, “Gay Synagogue Holds Separate Event After Exclusion from Israel Day Parade,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (New York, NY), May 10, 1993.  

Gene Alperovich, “YU Marches On — But Only After a Fight.” The Commentator (New York, NY), May 11, 1993. 

Judith Solomon, “YU Demonstrates Support for Israel: Parade 1993,” The Observer (New York, NY), May 12, 1993. [page 7]

Michael Broyde, “Bullets that Kill on the Rebound: Discrimination Against Homosexuals and Orthodox Public Policy,” Jewish Action, Sept. 1993.

Marc Angel, Hillel Goldberg and Pinchas Stolper, “Rending the Body Politic: Where the Bullets Really Go,” Jewish Action, Sept. 1993.

Larry Yudelson, “Clouds of Last Year Won’t Rain on This Year’s Parade for Israel,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (New York, NY), May 19, 1994.